


Drunk by Noon

by bluesyturtle



Category: True Detective
Genre: Child Death, Divorce, Dysfunctional Relationships, F/M, Flashbacks, Gen, Infidelity, Memories, Nihilism, Partnership, Past Drug Use, Philosophy, Recreational Drug Use, Self-Harm
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-31
Updated: 2014-01-31
Packaged: 2018-01-10 15:51:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,812
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1161651
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bluesyturtle/pseuds/bluesyturtle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rust dreams sometimes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Drunk by Noon

**Author's Note:**

> _And on my deathbed, I’ll get all the answers even if all my questions are taken away/If my life was as long as the moon’s, I’d still be jealous of the sun/If my life lasted only one day, I’d still be drunk by noon_

“I don’t sleep,” Rust tells Marty somewhere along a dirt road in an ambiguous part of this heap of land they find themselves inhabiting together.

“You don’t sleep?” Marty sounds incredulous. He tends to most times Rust shares personal information of any kind with him. “Like, ever; you don’t ever sleep.”

Between the chemically-induced hallucinations and the stuporous hours of wakefulness that ensue when real sleep eludes him, his mind races. Rust calculates, theorizes, and recycles the ditched synaptic efforts for the next possible answer. The cycle repeats and perpetuates itself; compute the data, formulate an explanation, begin again.

Infinitely looped, the information spins behind his eyes. Rust learned a long time ago that it was the only way to be in this kind of work that he does—whether it’s the cartel, whether it’s serial killers, whether it’s rapists.

Evidence and opinion; these two things he throws together into the vortical processor of his mind.

Dismissively, Rust repeats his answer, “No.”

He says he doesn’t sleep, and he doesn’t, usually, not unless his body reaches that limit that he attempts scaling every so often. Respect for these types of corporal boundaries, anatomical rules, Rust can navigate easily enough. With that black expanse of unconscious, accidentally crafted sleep, so comes the threat of dreams.

Most nights he lies awake blinking into the shadows. Some nights he works. He used to drive for hours until the sun came up, contemplating what would happen if he chose to instigate disaster—whether it would count for anything at all if he mangled lives or decimated possible futures—whether it would be a tragedy if he chose one night that it didn’t matter at all.

He’d made up his mind a while ago, disillusioned. His center had been lost that manner, with that kind of thoughtless destruction. Human beings resemble dandelions in that way. All it takes is a well-aimed kick, a strong enough wind, a heavy enough deluge to tear down the delicate wisps of botanical vitality; just cattle in the ultimate game of the universe.

Rust doesn’t go driving anymore unless he has to, unless he’s going somewhere, meeting someone—unless he will be forced to be held accountable for his actions.

Even if it is in his power to break the individual but interconnected worlds of complete strangers, he can’t reconcile stooping to such careless cruelty when his faculties could be employed elsewhere. Back when he worked Narcotics there was never any question when the other shoe would drop, when he’d have to be a cop. It comes down to just that sometimes, and sometimes the thought by itself is the only thing stopping him from letting loose the chaos stored up within him.

All humans are chaotic at their cores. Even Marty, for every mite of the beauty with which he’s surrounded himself like a king surrounds his castle with moats and spikes, is not without his vices.

“So, what, you must crash hard after.”

“Sometimes,” Rust concedes with a shrug. Sometimes he does.

Marty nods, mumbles something under his breath that could be profane or could be gibberish or could be pleas to a deity Rust doesn’t believe exists. He leans back in his seat and Marty drives, and this slow, uneventful progression of time and silence that has become their lives hovers statically in the atmosphere of the car.

Usually he’s comfortable in the silence or at least can summon indifference toward it. This kind of tension, situational tension, is unusual for him. But then, he does sleep sometimes, doesn’t he, even if that can be unusual, too.

They don’t speak on the drive, no matter what Marty feels twitching and hissing in the quiet. Marty likes the car to be silent, or he says he does. Rust doesn’t doubt he means it. He can’t see the point.

There are a lot of things, so people tell him, that he doesn’t see.

The biggest joke is that he can see it all just fine: the phony hierarchies in place that command respect and submission even for all their hypocrisies; the systematic obedience of so many devoutly religious people to huge congregations, making themselves as sheep for a preacher claiming to be some sort of mouthpiece for their God; the incapability of the people in this town to realize the inconsequentiality of their existences.

People think he doesn’t see it, but he sees just fine. Marty can say Rust is panicked, and well, maybe he’s right in his assessment. Rust never told him he wasn’t right. He’s not sure either way.

It would be nice to know less; to have experienced marginally less.

It would have been nice not to have killed men whose deaths were an improvement to the general quality of life for society as a whole or to co-exist with people in the world that could warrant such a sentence. It would have been nice not to have done quite so many drugs or to have been so far removed from his sanity at the time of his daughter’s death that he could have revived his marriage.

It would have been so nice if he hadn’t been born into a world that encouraged a fruitless rat race of reproduction amid a dying star in the center of some obsolete celestial body rooted inside an abandoned highway of the ancient, already expired cosmos. Theirs is a constantly evolving species of increasingly intelligent, though supremely desensitized human beings—naked primates, ashamed of the sin attached to their motley uniforms of imperfect flesh.

How nice, he thinks, it would be if survival hadn’t been programmed into his DNA, driving each reaction to stimuli in his corneas, in his hands, in his legs.

Someone will probably kill him one of these days. The only question is how much more blood will he have on his hands by the time that fateful day for Judgments rolls around. The difference between him and the rest of the people here, including Marty, is that he’s not waiting for God to pinch his cheek and welcome him into heaven, nor is he anticipating a merciless, burning stay in hell for the evil things he’s done and does and will always do so long as he lives and breathes on this earth.

He isn’t waiting to become a tree or a river or a schoolteacher in the next life, and he isn’t expecting void.

When Rust dies, the exact moment his brain short-circuits and the lights go out for good, he’s betting it’ll be game over. He called himself a pessimist, but really, the hope he holds that when it ends it really ends is just that: hope.

He’s glad for the victims who were killed rather than made to suffer inhumane cruelty and torture—as much as he believes cruelty rather _is_ a humane concept and not as immoral as some like to suggest. Amoral is a better word. Cruelty is in the same universal vein as nature, the nature of humans and beasts and the Nature that ruled the world before man and will rule the world after man kills himself trying to perfect it.

The great secret, of course, is that natures and Nature are on separate realms entirely. Rust has seen it in poetry and he’s heard it in sermons—all about man’s nature and Nature who is humanity’s mother being linked in goodness and morals and righteousness. Nature our Mother, like women, have been strategically placed below man, named as a tool or buffet upon which man fats himself and spreads his seed, whether that seed happens to be children, madness, crops, or disease. Marty’s got himself two women and two girls. Rust had his daughter, and for a while after, he had his wife. They make such an unruly mess of things, men do.

That’s not to spare the women, but Rust has a limited knowledge of what a feminine psyche really feels like. The closest he ever came to sympathizing was the night Sofia was born, when Claire held his hand and screamed, sounding agonized and frantic but wildly happy in a subtextual kind of way that he could fully reciprocate.

And when she looked down at that pink-faced baby and then back up at Rust with a relieved but delirious expression, he understood that, too.

Rust watches the swamps and the low-hanging branches of the old leaning trees that comprise the landscape as it shuffles by on the other side of the glass. He listens to the road pass beneath them and focuses around and beneath that constant pushing rhythm that mimics a restless tide until he can hear his heart beating above the rest of the noise. The pace is a steady one; it provides its own kind of music in the peacefully silent vehicle.

It isn’t until a few minutes later when Rust has closed his eyes and begun to set his heartbeat to the turning of the tires over the ruined back roads that Marty switches on the radio.

At home, the cubicle that houses his mattress, Rust pores over the case files. For the better part of the night his mind remains tautly stretched between two modes of thought, caught halfway in between relevant ideas and abstract memories transformed by imagination and longing. He’s come to believe that trauma can have the effect on a person that death otherwise would—the long grief, the pain of suffering, the incessant distraction, and the subsequent quest for a distraction from the distraction.

The nights all blend together, for the most part. They’re just like their drawn out mornings at the station, the brief lunches, the demanding footwork that takes them through the afternoons, evenings, and often, the nights, too. These binge-type sessions that take place in between the blackest part of nightfall and the bloody start of dawn, they merge and blur into one bloodshot hour in Rust’s life that he never hopes to hold in his hands again that he might spend them in exactly the same way.

He doesn’t get tired when he works through the ever-stretching lapse of time that isn’t an hour but really could be just an hour if not less in the grand scheme of things. Sometimes he’ll blink and find he’s lost an hour, maybe two; other times he’ll sit down and forget that his body aches or stings from disuse for a reason. Those times he does push-ups to calm his muscles from the fear of atrophy—to steady himself from the fear of turning to stone.

One of these nights that he’s up reading from these case files, looking at dead girls and trying to divine the symbols left behind on their bodies like some kind of priest or sorcerer, Maggie calls. Her voice is afraid in a kind of way that suggests maybe the slight tremor tucked inside her words isn’t bred of fear but of dread and dormant anxiety.

So many things sound and look and tangibly feel like fear. But only a few things really are fear.

He doesn’t rule it out as a possibility. Maggie is sturdy, though his perspective and explicit knowledge of the fact are limited. Fear wouldn’t make her weak in his eyes, and if he ever presumed to think her weak, she wouldn’t be just because he passed any kind of judgment.

Anyway, people could only ever be brave when faced with fear.

Her questions are halfway expressed, and he doesn’t tell her much of anything. Whether it’s out of a sense of loyalty to his partner or out of mercy for the pair of them, Maggie and Marty together, or out of a desire not to get in the middle of a domestic issue where he has already been warned not to show his face he isn’t sure.

He wants to be kind to Maggie because she treats him with kindness, because she did as much before he really deserved it.

Because she can laugh when he says he’d like to date a nurse for the easier access to drugs. Because maybe she knows he’s speaking closer to the heart than his glibness would really hint that he cares to admit.

It isn’t easy to be kind to someone when that someone is requesting the pure, unadulterated truth. The truth is cruel and natural; it only knows how to be and how to make its fruits known, much like a seemingly delicate sprig of green that halves concrete and emerges into the sunlight, upright and proud.

Marty doesn’t want Rust mowing his lawn. He can’t take this phone call either; can’t take it for the dive into sanctuary that it is on Maggie’s part; can’t be honest the way he would be if the consequences really didn’t matter to him, but maybe they do. Maybe, and he could be grasping at straws, but maybe compassion wins out over ruthless, unfeeling survival. Maybe the pessimist in him only shrinks from optimism because of the great responsibility that would be brought along with it.

Maybe he is panicked. 

He’d told Marty man couldn’t love. He tells Maggie to go to sleep.

With the lights turning out all around him the filaments burn a while more until fading the same way that embers die out in fireplaces. The streaks of light stay burning in his mind, and he shakes and shivers through the shocks of an old memory tainted anew by corruption and nihilistic oppression.

Time stutters a few hours forward, vaulting him into the future of the present, and his eyes fall open to the sound of an alarm calling him in some amorphous, mechanical language. Rust maybe dreamed, but he can’t remember. The only point of reference is the obliging silence stretching between, “Go to sleep, Maggie,” and the soft, patient press of the phone to the receiver.

He’d imagined then that she had been sitting in a room painted in the same subdued light, with the curtains drawn and nonspecific personal items, arbitrary talismans, scattered around her the same way his books and his bisected files and his photographs were strewn about him on the floor like a protection circle. He’d entertained the idea that they could have been in the same room for how evenly their neatly separated atmospheres coalesced in spite of distance and circumstance and humanity and loquacious doctrine.

Rust gets up and silences the singing alarm, deaf to its meaning beyond the din and its purpose. Its functionality is its own type of message, but like any creation, beast or machine or structure, it behaves according to the actions performed upon it and stops when he wills for it to stop.

God’s like any killer they pursue; he’s like any man with a watch counting down the seconds.

Maybe that power makes man godly in his own right, that he can make the blood flow like water if he wants to. Maybe the simultaneous gift and curse of the womb makes women even godlier—makes her the mother to man’s tantrum he so proudly calls free will.

Rust takes the razor carefully across the prominently exposed notch of his Adam’s apple and wets the blade before holding it lower, over his sternum. He watches the sting flower red and then creep so slowly down the midway point of his chest. Somewhere beneath the skin, the sinew, and the collection of bones and tendons and cells his heart reroutes his blood toward that offended slit in his skin, now bleeding more profusely and gathering at his navel.

How nice it would be if he weren’t hardwired to survive at a cellular level. How nice it would be if this blood—if any of the blood shed by his hand—could purify or renew or provide salvation.

He cleans it away and tapes up the little gouge in his skin.

Maybe he is panicked. 

Maybe he is grasping at straws.

He heads out the door, groomed and dressed and awake and hungry. It’s very likely Marty will have brought breakfast by the time he gets to work, but that’s only if he shows up on time with the sleep brushed out of his eyes.

Strike that; there probably won’t be breakfast.

He tells himself it’s for the best and obeys every traffic law on his way to the station. He even switches on the radio, finding the lull of tires too soothing for such an early hour; too easy, then, for his thoughts to drift and slide him backward into the past; too effortless of a descent into the cold, unending depths of his mind.

Rust doesn’t want to dream. He’s not sold on living either, but the two are irreparably intertwined, aren’t they; dreams within dreams within dreams.

He pulls into the lot outside the station. He’ll have to make up his mind, sooner or later.

**Author's Note:**

> Title and lyrics from the Handsome Family
> 
> “A Dream within a Dream” by Edgar Allan Poe


End file.
